Orientul Mijlociu

During a telephonic conversation between Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and his Syrian counterpart Faisal Mekdad, they discussed recent progress in their countries’ relationship and addressed regional matters. Simultaneously, the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria caught diplomats off guard by announcing their intention to initiate trials for numerous suspected foreign Islamic State fighters who have been under their custody for an extended period, raising concerns about the proper legal procedures. Additionally, a Turkish-backed armed opposition group apprehended seven Syrian individuals, including a woman, in a city located north of Hassakeh Governorate in northeastern Syria. These arrests occurred shortly after the individuals had been deported from Turkey.

Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “used the Islamic concept of ‘Taqiyya’ to describe the regime’s decision to accept the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with the West. Taqiyya means the permissibility to deny or conceal one’s real beliefs to secure a worthy goal.” — iranintl.com, May 20, 2023.

At a gathering in Riyadh of the global alliance to defeat IS, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked partners to repatriate their detained citizens and announced new funding for stabilization work in Iraq and Syria.

Officials in northeast Syria tell Al-Monitor that women in Islamic State internment camps are forcing young boys to impregnate women as part of an alleged IS campaign to “go forth and multiply.”

Sitting on a classroom chair, his fingers drumming nervously on a tablet, a young boy slowly raises his head to reveal a pair of pale green eyes, high cheekbones and a chiseled jaw.

The United States and Saudi Arabia urged countries to take back citizens captured in the fight against Islamic State, with the kingdom’s top diplomat saying it was “absolutely unacceptable” that wealthy countries skirted that responsibility.

The Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuad Hussein, confirmed on Thursday that 3,000 Iraqi terrorists detained in Syria have been returned to Iraq, where the majority of them have been tried, according to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Al-Sahaf.

U.S. officials tasked with tracking Islamic State are seeing worrisome signs that the terror group’s core leadership is strengthening control over its global network of affiliates despite a series of key losses.

Specifically, the United States is raising concerns about the group’s General Directorate of Provinces, a series of nine regional offices set up over the past several years to sustain the group’s reputation and global capabilities.

As diplomats & journalists focus on Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank, there’s less attention on an expansion of segregation & racialised planning in the Galilee as the Israeli government intensifies historical policy, writes Ben White.

When the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an armed Islamist group which is a successor to the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, rolled into Afrin in northern Syria earlier this month, the primary reaction was one of confusion.

HTS had for some time functioned as an unwilling but significant part of the uneasy administration of the country’s north – much of which is administered with the help of Turkey and its intelligence services, the National Intelligence Organization (MIT).

The two most powerful armed, non-regime groups in Syria have made separate proposals to resettle millions of Syrian refugees in the Middle East in their respective territories.

These proposals are not insignificant since the two groups currently hold the vast majority of Syrian territory outside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s control.